Black Deutschland (20 page)

The suburb of Cicero, Illinois, kicked Reverend King so hard it made Mahalia Jackson groan. Mom didn’t like her, but everybody knew that Reverend King adored her as the song of trial. Mom told me years later that she had, indeed, piled on top of the knocked-down nun with the other sisters to protect her that night in Marquette Park, but she hadn’t shouted prayers to anyone.

*   *   *

On the day of Harold Washington’s funeral, we met by the front door, dressed in a kind of mourning, for the mayor, for the black family-owned newspaper that would not have been able to cover the story of the fallen black hero. It had been a while since our house had been a gathering place at such a time. Something like church platters of carrots, celery, deviled eggs, and ham and cheese slices between miniature buns had been placed around the living room, dining room, and on top of the hall bookshelf. The church-platter fairies turned out to be two arthritic, trembling secretaries, the last of Shay Holdings, Inc.

They talked at the same time, but not about the same thing. They were right behind Mom as she retreated to the kitchen. One was telling Mom that she would never forget her winter as a returning graduate student in Detroit. The snowplows were out every morning. Wayne State was practically stranded behind the walls of snow the plows had built up. The other was asking over her, like a descant line, if Aunt Gloria, Ruthanne’s mother, had ever made that album of Christmas songs she was always talking about, because she could use gift ideas.

The doorbell rang, admitting former newspaper staff members. Word had got around. Before too long, the living room seemed full of old heads examining the trays in Dad’s and Mom’s hands. Maybe I didn’t comprehend or stop to consider what the end of the
Eagle
might mean to them, but these people did, elderly vendors, retired machinists.

The doorbell kept ringing, bringing in movement types, Unitarian church types, grandmothers who’d got off night shifts that morning, University of Chicago sociology contacts, more people who used to work at the
Eagle
, neighbors, black or white, though some of them, blacks included, wanted to call the square East Ogden again.

Of the many women over the years whom Mom had made phone calls to jails for or loaned money to, few stayed in touch or went back to school. This did not mean that they had not turned their lives around, wherever they were, Mom sometimes said. Dad let her believe what she wanted when it came to her crazies. He didn’t argue. Mom moved on to greet an old colleague from the National Welfare Rights Organization. Two former crazies in front of me didn’t look as though they were doing that great, but that was no reason for the old secretaries to pretend the crazies had not said hello and that it was a sad day. Shay Holdings, Inc.’s last servants walked out of the kitchen rather than be compromised socially by the formerly homeless.

“Good soldier, where is thy switchblade?” I heard Dad say to a priest from St. Thomas the Apostle up the street. Dad wore a black armband and a red bow tie. Mom had fixed to the back of her head a fractured fascinator of small artificial cream-colored roses.

The television in the living room, the only one in the house, had been going nonstop since Harold Washington’s heart failed him. He was a good man, ahead of his time, the television repeated, the professional mourner among us. I heard Shay Holdings, Inc., say that she couldn’t hack the cold November rain or the downtown crowds, and that she was glad to pay her respects without having to mess with a service, while the other secretary topped her with her gratitude that she had found all of her recipes in a big Christmas box, when for the longest time she just assumed she’d lost them with her other things that time her basement flooded.

They were hanging out by the hall bookshelf, glancing into the living room where denture-rattling Uncle Ralston sat with a mute Ralston Jr. and a low-moaning Aunt Gloria. Everyone was in the kitchen or the dining room, Mom and Dad, too, so as not to have to navigate that triangle of family weirdness.

I looked at Cello’s father, sitting in his fantastic absence of mind. His first breakdown wasn’t called that, but the second, in 1964, was impossible to explain away. He became manic over Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the presidency. They brought him home, almost hog-tied. Cello was twelve. Before she ever had a date, he’d been brought back from Africa, and then he starved himself in an adaptation of Dick Gregory’s diet. In those days, he carried around chess pawns that he’d press into our palms. We’d hand his secrets over to Dad.

“Who they?” a former crazy asked of me in the hall outside the living room.

“When the going gets rough, make pancakes,” I heard Dad chime somewhere.

*   *   *

“Happy trails. Put it there.”

“Jed.”

He slow-motion punched my Pillsbury Doughboy middle. “Jed.”

He didn’t tell me his name, but I knew his name because he came to see Mom a lot in the days following the riot.

The white boy backed Dad up in his not letting Mom go to any more demonstrations that summer. Dad said it was bad enough that there were psycho nurse killers loose in the city. As if to make it up to her, the white boy let Mom convert his feelings into an eyewitness account of a white riot by one of the rioters who had repented of his ways and joined the very movement he had attacked. He spoke roughly; she put it down cleaned up. He understood quickly that that was how things were done.

I sat around and watched them, my legs swinging from the chair. He lasted two weeks in the movement. He confessed that his people didn’t know about his open letter in the
Eagle
, a colored newspaper, and they didn’t want him in parts of town he didn’t know after dark, even at his age. He’d not told his people enough about what he pretended was the church group he’d become interested in. I’d somehow won my own copy of that issue of the
Eagle
, though I did not understand what the trouble was about. I couldn’t believe he’d been one of the whites throwing cherry bombs at our cars. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

I’d come across the yellowed copy of his letter from the summer of 1966 in the bottom of the last box in my closet. I started to ask Mom what had become of him, but I didn’t want to learn that she’d found his name on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which Dad had refused to visit with her.

*   *   *

Dad said, “Crow is my least favorite food. It’s even worse when taken with the recommended slices of humble pie.” He was telling the story of how Mom believed in Harold Washington from the get-go, while he thought the poor man would just lose and lose.

Mom raced into the living room, as though getting away from someone in the hall. She looked over at Aunt Gloria, who still had her head in her hands, the straps of her black patent leather purse wrapped like reins around her hand. The priest pushed through us and sat beside Aunt Gloria, comforting her. We could pretend that the triangle of family weirdness was a vigil for coalition politics in Chicago.

The television’s prayers had let up and we’d come to a political history part of the broadcast. Uncle Ralston tried to raise himself from his chair, his teeth knocking. I didn’t know if he thought to welcome us into the living room or if he was going to attack the television. I was sure I saw Ralston Jr. clock exactly where his father was.

“The negrificity of these proceedings.” Uncle Ralston found his feet. “I object.”

“I know.” Ralston Jr. leaned over. “Chubby Checker and Cassius Clay are the same man. Muhammad Ali is somebody else.”

Dad put a tray of raw celery and carrots in Uncle Ralston’s shaking hands and pushed him back toward the chair. Miniature carrots jumped like Mexican beans in an old-fashioned arcade game. I couldn’t believe that that was Dad. Ralston Jr. swerved away with a grin when his father landed back in the chair with a fart.

“Excuse me,” Dad said and stuck a carrot between Uncle Ralston’s porcelain incisors.

Uncle Ralston would never retire or sell up or invest in anything new. His black suits got shiny with age. When people came to Dad with a plan they wanted him to run by Uncle Ralston, Dad had a way of getting them mired in the muck, remembering how magnificent Texas Instruments had been and how much he admired the company for getting out of oil and in with the government over the whole semiconductor thing. He knew there was no point telling Uncle Ralston anything radical, he who let a chance to get in on the Seaway National Bank go by.

Uncle Ralston did not want women at business meetings, though middle-aged and older black women comprised most of his company at its death. The
Eagle
had shrunk, and women ran Uncle Ralston’s subsidiary Bible and religious printing businesses. Dad said that the properties owned by Shay Holdings, Inc., including black nursing homes, a medical supply company, and soul food restaurants southeast of the defunct stockyards, didn’t exactly lose money, but they didn’t make enough to keep the newspaper going. It was over. Uncle Ralston was holding the baby carrot like a candle and blinking up at Dad.

“One day we will all get away to that better place.” Mrs. Williams was in the hall, much to my surprise. She entered the living room followed by a thickset man with processed hair. I looked around for Mom.

The thickset man was already working the room, saying, “What’s happening, brother man,” handing out his attorney business card, and telling the women that women were the healers in the black community at times like these, the conjure doctors, the root workers. It was impossible to squeeze his hand, to get the advantage over him in a handshake. I could tell he liked to be the one to let the other guy go. He wore gold rings on both hands, a gold watch on one thick wrist, a gold ID bracelet on the other. His clothes weren’t cheap, but they were inner-city threads, brands popular among blacks, like Cole Haan shoes. They were appropriately gray. His hair smelled like James Brown’s music.

The attorney settled on an arm of Uncle Ralston’s chair, took the vegetables from him, and handed the tray to one of the elderly secretaries, who, like me, was inspecting the only plausible man in the room.

Mrs. Williams came over to me, beaming. “I see you, your nose all up in the air, you sissy,” she whispered. She was smiling away, lightly touching my sleeve. “God’s judgment is upon my grandson as it will land upon you one day, for we are made Hebrew Israelites, not punks.”

“Fifty-fifty box,” Uncle Ralston began, pointing at Aunt Gloria.

“No, no, no, no,” we heard as Aunt Gloria accelerated in heels across Mom’s tricky parquet and raised her purse against Uncle Ralston. She didn’t get to him. The attorney intercepted her easily and scooped her with evident pleasure against his double-breasted wool. “Hold,” he called, as if his voice came from his massive thighs. The priest waited for Aunt Gloria to release the purse into his hands. Mrs. Williams tried to take over Aunt Gloria, but the attorney was not letting go.

“My understanding is that he was alone,” someone said in the crowd that didn’t know whether to keep looking or to act like nothing untoward was happening. “Anything could have gone on in the mayor’s office, for all we know.”

“I’m hip. One side door, one injection.”

The television coverage moved into interviews with stricken associates of the departed mayor. Bottles and flasks and plastic cups that did not belong to the house came out of raincoats and handbags as people who loved Mom and Dad but knew they didn’t know how to party got louder. Uncle Ralston craned around, looking for Aunt Gloria perhaps. She was with the attorney in an arrangement of chairs, and Dad had moved Ralston Jr. out of harm’s way by a window. He, too, wore a black suit. Mrs. Williams darted off to get in on some Johnnie Walker.

In a flash, it had become impossible to remain sober in Chicago. I felt the need for an AA sponsor and was humbled that I couldn’t recall the name of the guy who’d volunteered to act as mine when I got out of rehab thirty months before.

*   *   *

After I had dropped out of the University of Illinois, Cello told me that my real problem was that I did not believe myself to be good enough. Her advice was that I set my sights lower, in all things, like checking the National Achievement box, a separate category for Negroes on the National Merit exam that was judged by a lower standard and was therefore an attainable prize for black students like me, who were psychologically disadvantaged. Cello had not got over her Bicentennial Concert Disaster of the year before and she never would.

I just looked at the telephone receiver, believing, as I did then, in the poetry of my impending nervous breakdown.

To go nuts had been my plan for what to do once I had dropped out of school. But when I wasn’t hearing the voices that flocked into Ralston Jr.’s head during his breakdowns, and forgetting to eat or getting lost on the El or acting out in abandoned downtown blocks by the new library didn’t bring to my synapses the traffic of psychosis, I couldn’t think what to do other than to drink even more.

I was soon going to run out of money and in that state I stayed with successive unsuspecting someones. I was usually asked to seek shelter elsewhere once it had become clear to my helper in my crisis that I would continue to drink up everything alcoholic that came into the house. I knew I was putting off having to go home to face my parents, the son and daughter of graduates of black colleges in the traditional antiblack South.

“Remember, they have to take us now, but they don’t have to keep us,” Mom said hopefully when she and Dad left me at the brick-everywhere university in Champaign, Illinois, three years before.

My first year I spent my extra money on drinking; my second year I spent my tuition on drinking and the university notified Dad that I’d failed to register. He flew down the same day and made it to the bursar’s office. He took me out to dinner and I got drunk. He stayed in a motel and said the next morning that it was okay that I could not get over to say goodbye. I didn’t have a car.

He never scolded me for what I’d wasted. My dad said that one of the worst feelings in the world was that of not knowing what was one’s calling, one’s path. He said he knew people laughed, but he never doubted that accountancy had been right for him. He hoped I’d find mine soon. Until I did, not knowing what to do with one’s life was worse than not having a woman or a family to love.